Project information

Dear Visitor,

Welcome to the website of the ChangeHabitats 2 project. Our project coordinates the intersectoral research and development activity of three university institutes and five SMEs from Austria, Germany, Hungary and Poland in the framework of IAPP of Marie Curie Actions of the European Commission.

The main goal of our activities is to promote the use of airborne laser scanning and airborne hyperspectral imagery in the observation, research, and management of Natura 2000 sites by analysing the needs, developing high-end data acquisition and processing tools and doing research in this field. The successful completion of our project will contribute to a more uniform, reliable data gathering about the various habitats of these important sites of nature protection.

The environment of the aforementioned protected sites is continuously changing, unfortunately typically deteriorating. In order to be able to counteract to the negative effects of industrialization, urbanization, growing traffic networks and similar processes, the Natura 2000 sites have to be regularly observed whether the habitats and species to be protected are affected by changes. This tedious work is typically based on observations in the field and, of course, it is a very costly activity. With advanced high-resolution remote sensing technologies the technical possibility of observation of some features (e.g. presence of dead wood) already exists, however, its application is not yet elaborated enough to become applicable in everyday nature protection practice. Our research and development work is aimed at to cover this gap by developing and implementing techniques that can provide valuable and very detailed information for managing Natura 2000 sites .

Below you can find the most important facts about the project. For more information please visit our other pages as well, check out our project objectives and events. In the later phase of the project publications will also be available here.

Full title of the project:

Network for Habitat Monitoring by Airborne-supported Field work – An innovative and effective process in implementation of the Habitat Directive